Liam, Micah and Me

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.

    And what does the Lord require of you?

To act justly and to love mercy

    and to walk humbly[a] with your God.

(from Micah 6:1-8)

The image of 5-year-old Liam Ramos and his bunny hat surrounded by ICE soldiers still haunts me.

Recognizing he was walking home from preschool, taken from his dad, transferred to a detention facility, and gets sick while confined, doesn’t help.

What kind of experience of loneliness and darkness is this poor child having?

How terrified is this boy being transferred from one place to another by soldiers?

I find this blog difficult to write because I have been through my own “terrors of the night” (PS 91:5) some as a child, some as a teen, some as a young adult, now some as an elder.

This phrase comes from Psalm 91:5, which speaks to finding comfort in faith during times of fear.

What creates the difficulty is the apparent lack of hope in a “terror of the night.”

My hope for Liam Ramos and anyone experiencing loneliness and darkness comes from the Word of the Lord through Micah’s ancient wisdom offering guidance for responding to suffering with justice and compassion."

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
    And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
    and to walk humbly with your God.

For me, this a vision of Jesus’s peaceable kingdom where God’s love defeats the enemies of loneliness and abandonment.

It is a hopeful vision of healing in the dark and broken places of our world.

God's Mountain of Blessings

 "I waited patiently for the Lord;

he turned to me and heard my cry.

He lifted me out of the slimy pit

out of the mud and mire;

he set my feet on a rock

and gave me a firm place to stand."

(from Psalm 40)

Wilson Bentley, also known as Snowflake Bentley, a farmer, American meteorologist, photographer, was the first known person capturing and documenting detailed snowflake photographs.

With his camera he developed a method to photograph snowflakes on black velvet before they melted, discovering that each one has a distinct shape.

A major scientific contribution of his time was the theory that no two snowflakes were identical.

Reflecting on the belief of God as Creator leads me to meditate on the snowflake as a blessing of God’s creation.

Looking at a huge, plowed heap of snow at my driveway’s end, I can either see a pile of snow or a mountain of God’s blessings.

With continuing media coverage of violence, I feel like I’m in the “slimy pit with mud and mire.” described at the beginning of Psalm 40.

So, like the Psalm, “I am waiting patiently for the Lord; knowing he will turn to me and hear my cry.
    he turned to me and heard my cry. “

Amid violence, God's hope surrounds us with blessings, much like snow in my driveway’s end strengthening and encouraging us.

God’s hope and love Psalm 40 and in the mountain of snow is a reminder that God constantly surrounding us and as Psalm 40 concludes:

He set our feet on a rock
    and gave us a firm place to stand.

In the thick of discouraging media images of violence, there’ the mountain of hope in a driveway’s pile of God’s blessings.